Alain De Botton

It's like, oh, this is a lesson.

I thought it was a bit of fun.

But I think that the true mission of the novel is to kind of educate the reader.

It's almost like it should be like a flight simulator, a life simulator, where safely in the kind of cockpit, in this artificial cockpit...

that the writer creates for you, you're able to go through some experiences which should help you to grow and develop.

And I wrote this book explicitly as a kind of growth story that we go from a couple who don't know anything about love.

They're romantics.

They just love the enthusiasm.

And then painfully, painfully, they pick up certain lessons along the way.

And I think that many of the reasons why

We have difficult love lives and it sounds odd, but I think that a lot of the blame is because we don't read the right books and we don't see the right films.

And we therefore constantly think that our lives have gone wrong or different from the movies and from the novels are telling us.

So we're lying in bed and we're thinking, is this normal?

Is this, you know, whatever it is, an argument or no sex or lots of sex or whatever it is, some issue.

And we're implicitly comparing our love situation with what we've seen in art.

And I think most of the time we've got the wrong art around us.

We've got art that panics us because it doesn't confirm the things we're actually going through.

And I think, you know, my deepest wish for the novel, and I've had some lovely comments from readers occasionally, they'll say things like, it felt a bit like my own marriage.

It felt like my relationship, but it felt like things that other people don't talk about.

And I think that for me is what literature should be doing.